Despite elsewhere indicating that he indeed would at least admit and entertain the possibility of linguistic-representational nurture reflexively altering embodied emotional nature in a thoroughly dialectical fashion, LeDoux, at the very end of the last block quotation in the previous paragraph, seems to risk regressing back to a nondialectical position according to which alterations to affective life wrought by the nonnatural or not-entirely-natural dimensions determinative of humanity’s distinguishing peculiarities are reduced to an ineffectual secondary status as mere window dressing arrayed around the fringes of a fixed, unchanged biomaterial ground (“the conscious feelings are the frills that have added icing to the emotional cake”). Once more, a brief reminder about the previous discussion of Žižek’s perspective on these matters (in chapter 12) is appropriate. Two points are particularly topical here: First, this moment in LeDoux’s reflections represents a naturalist tendency within even the most nonreductive neuroscientific materialisms (that of not only LeDoux but also Damasio)23 that warrant the Lacan-inspired criticisms Žižek levels against Damasio and LeDoux (the prior defense of these latter two relies on other moments in their writings when they steer clear of nondialectical reductivism). Second, this same moment in the concluding pages of The Emotional Brain overlooks something The Parallax View rightly and insightfully highlights, namely, that the gap between the biological and the more-than-biological comes to function as itself an affective factor, rather than affective phenomena falling exclusively on one side or the other of this gap (i.e., as either emotions of a biological nature or feelings of a more-than-biological nurture). Maybe what makes an affect a specifically human experience (as distinct from the bodily emotions and psychological feelings evidently also undergone by nonhuman sentient mammals) is its bearing witness to humanity’s status as stranded in an ontological limbo between nature and antinature, torn between split planes of existence irrupting out of the immanence of a self-sundering material Real.24
Returning to more empirical terrain and examining Panksepp’s work in greater depth promises to be fruitful. Several times, he stresses that neuroplasticity holds for emotional systems as much as for other components of human neuroanatomy.25 In relation to this, he (like both Damasio and LeDoux) grants that cognitive mediations and modulations, involving complex symbolic and linguistic representational constellations, play significant roles in coloring and inflecting affective phenomena in human life;26 a two-way street of dialectical and reciprocal co-determination connects cognition and emotion for beings with highly developed cerebral cortices in addition to other, “lower” neural components left over from archaic evolutionary histories and shared with various other animal organisms.27 Panksepp goes so far as to argue, as regards humans, that “one can never capture innate emotional dynamics in their pure form, except perhaps when they are aroused artificially by direct stimulation of brain areas where those operating systems are most concentrated.”28 Reiterating this argument later, he states:
It is becoming increasingly clear that humans have as many instinctual operating systems in their brains as other mammals. However, in mature humans such instinctual processes may be difficult to observe because they are no longer expressed directly in adult behavior but instead are filtered and modified by higher cognitive activity. Thus, in adult humans, many instincts manifest themselves only as subtle psychological tendencies, such as subjective feeling states, which provide internal guidance to behavior. The reason many scholars who know little about modern brain research are still willing to assert that human behavior is not controlled by instinctual processes is because many of our operating systems are in fact very “open” and hence very prone to be modified by the vast layers of cognitive and affective complexity that learning permits. Still, the failure of psychology to deal effectively with the nature of the many instinctual systems of human and animal brains remains one of the great failings of the discipline. The converse could be said for neuroscience.29
A number of comments are called for here. To begin with, in the second half of this quotation, Panksepp accurately and succinctly diagnoses the parallel shortcomings of “psychology” (as associated with nurture-centric constructivism) and “neuroscience” (as associated with nature-centric biologism) with respect to the (partially obsolete) debate between naturalism and antinaturalism. In Panksepp’s view, the plasticity of the human central nervous system, a plasticity affecting its emotional structures and dynamics, consists of the intertwining of inflexible “closed” and flexible “open” neural systems (i.e., on the one hand, those systems rigidly wired by genetics to produce relatively invariant patterns of cognition and comportment, and, on the other hand, those systems fluidly wired to be rewired by epigenetic or nongenetic accidents, contingencies, variables, and so on).30
In response to Panksepp, someone with Hegelian or psychoanalytic leanings might be inclined to retort that the purportedly epistemological inaccessibility of brute, raw instinctual emotions is not strictly and solely epistemological. Shouldn’t Panksepp’s spontaneous Kantianism, in which “pure” instinctual emotions are treated as thinkable-yet-unknowable noumenal things-in-themselves that exist beyond the epistemologically accessible affective phenomena “filtered and modified by higher cognitive activity,” be met with a Hegelianism speculating that this ostensible epistemological inaccessibility already directly discloses the “Thing itself,” the ontological Real supposedly barred by subjective reflection? In other words, certain versions of Hegelian philosophy and Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology would insist that the general absence of brute, raw instinctual emotions in the manifestations of specifically human existence is a testament to the thoroughgoing dialectical digestion of the natural by the more-than-natural, rather than a reflection of a noumenal-phenomenal split between these two dimensions depicted as separate and distinct realms of a neatly partitioned, two-tiered reality, one inaccessible (i.e., the natural or biological), the other accessible (i.e., the more-than-natural/biological). Pommier, whose Lacanian glosses on the neurosciences I will address in more detail later, appears to adopt a stance along these lines, maintaining that “once the entry into speech has been accomplished, ‘pure sensation’ becomes that from which we exile ourselves.”31 He adds that conceding this necessitates abandoning the “myth of an original paradise, that of our improbable animality.”32
Of course, to be perfectly honest and exact, portraying Panksepp as a spontaneous Kantian treating basic emotions (i.e., his seven “primary colors” of mammalian affective life) as akin to the notorious Ding an sich is far from fair. His denial of epistemological access to these emotional fundaments is not without qualification (in contrast with Kant’s unqualified denial of access to the noumenal realm lying forever beyond “the limits of possible experience”). Panksepp posits that there are exceptional circumstances in which these primal constituents of human bodily being come to light in their undiluted immediacy. However, he stresses the artificiality of these circumstances; in addition to the experimental tools and techniques of the laboratory that he has in mind, one might also imagine, taking into account psychoanalytic and sociopolitical considerations, brutal ordeals and overwhelming traumas as excessive “limit experiences” violently unleashing unprocessed corporeal intensities pitilessly reducing those who suffer these experiences to the dehumanized state of naked animality, of convulsing, writhing flesh. This precise qualification noted by Panksepp signals an inversion that itself arguably is constitutive of the human condition: the reversal of the respective positions or roles of, so to speak, first and second natures (or Žižek’s life 1.0 and life 2.0), a reversal in which the secondary becomes the primary and vice versa.
Such an inversion can be clarified further through reference to Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. Therein, Agamben examines the distinction, rooted in the language of ancient Greece, between “zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way
of living proper to an individual or a group.”33 Without getting bogged down in what would be, in the present context, a tangential exegesis of Agamben’s genealogy of the distinction between zoē and bios in relation to structures of political sovereignty (a genealogy inspired by both Nietzsche and Foucault and particularly indebted to the latter’s concept of “biopower”),34 it suffices for now to draw attention to his contention that, in the always-already established individual and group forms or ways of life into which humans are thrown (i.e., bios), zoē as “bare life” is “produced” instead of being given.35 As he puts it in State of Exception: “There are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature, and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical machine. Bare life is a product of the machine and not something that preexists it.”36 In other words, in tandem with his rejection of standard, traditional “state of nature” narratives about humanity’s transition from pre-sociohistorical zoē red in tooth and nail to the sociohistorical bios of the polis as established on the basis of a “social contract,”37 Agamben proposes that humans are, at a default level, beings of bios (i.e., life organized and embellished by more-than-biological languages, institutions, practices, and so on) rather than creatures of zoē. Put differently, although the bare life that is zoē often is imagined as a first nature ontogenetically and phylogenetically preceding bios as the second nature of a nonbare life clothed by the artificial fabrications of language, society, and history, Agamben’s remarks correctly point out that exceptional “artificial” means (for him, the means being actions taken by established sovereign power with respect to the subject-bodies it rules over) are necessary to strip away the default second-nature-become-first-nature that is bios. In the inverted world of human life, zoē is correspondingly a first-nature-become-secondary, an exception to the rule of bios that appears, in Agambenian parlance, exclusively in legal-political “states of exception” enacted in the names of unusual circumstances and alleged crises.38
To circumnavigate back to Panksepp and neuroscientific matters, a combination of Agamben’s handling of the zoē-bios distinction with my position which is neither naturalist nor antinaturalist, a position centered on a hypothesized failed dialectic of incomplete denaturalization that is constitutive of human forms of subjectivity, enables the following to be said apropos a Lacan-influenced neuro-psychoanalytic metapsychology of affect: In human beings, the zoē of bare emotional life—this life doesn’t disappear with the advent of the bios of feelings and the array of their accompanying conditions of possibility, but is only partially eclipsed and absorbed by the mediating matrices giving shape to bios—is fractured, like Damasio’s core self, into unsublated brute, raw basic emotions (which manifest themselves solely in rare, extreme conditions) and sublated feelings as sociosymbolically translated emotions (or even, following Žižek, as affective states aroused by the gap between emotions and feelings). In Žižek’s parlance, the life 1.0 of zoē, although inverted into the produced exception instead of the given rule in the never-finished denaturalizations brought about by subjectification, resists being taken up without remainder into the nonnatural or not-wholly-natural defiles of bios as life 2.0. The “updates” don’t erase entirely the earlier versions, with bugs, glitches, and loopholes being generated by the unsynthesized layering of these materialized temporal-historical strata.
Panksepp is careful to stipulate that, despite their interpenetrating mutual entanglements, cognitive and emotional aspects of the human central nervous system nonetheless remain somewhat distinct and distinguishable.39 One shouldn’t sloppily lump them together into a muddy mess through an inelegantly quick-and-easy pseudodialectical approach that simply blurs the lines of conceptual demarcations in its haste to unite with what is imagined to be reality’s subtle shades of grey. For Panksepp, the differences between cognition and emotion are at least as important to keep in view as the fact of their reciprocal, entwined relatedness insofar as these differences are the sites of palpable friction between conflicting components and tendencies of subjects’ incompletely integrated, hodgepodge brains. He claims that, although the affective lives of human beings are substantially inflected by cognitive (i.e., cultural, ideational, linguistic, representational, social, symbolic, and so on) mediations, the compelling, gripping, potent pulsations of emotional phenomena issue forth from a comparatively ancient, primitive neural base.40 Furthermore, he maintains that an imbalance obtains between cognition and emotion as unequal partners in mental life: “emotions and regulatory feelings have stronger effects on cognitions than the other way around.”41 In terms of the calibration constitutive of (neuro)plasticity between open flexibility and closed inflexibility, Panksepp stresses that a certain degree of genetic closure at the level of basic emotional systems (deposited in brains over the course of the old, slow-moving currents of evolutionary times) sets limiting boundaries for the bandwidths of possible epigenetic or nongenetic openness to denaturalizing alterations of affective spectrums (alterations unfolding at temporal rhythms and rates of comparatively much faster speeds than natural-qua-evolutionary times): “the ability of the human cortex to think and to fantasize, and thereby to pursue many unique paths of human cultural evolution, can dilute, mold, modify, and focus the dictates of these systems, but it cannot eliminate them.”42 (Damasio argues for a similar perspective.)43
To segue into a space of overlap between the neurosciences and Lacanian metapsychology, not only is the human brain a concrete, biomaterial point of condensation for the only partially compatible temporal tracks of nonhuman evolutionary phylogeny and human sociohistorical phylogeny, but, as psychoanalysis starting with Freud repeatedly contends, various streams and sedimentations of subjective ontogenesis generate out of themselves, as a cacophonous ensemble, disharmonies and clashes that are the conflicts around which psychical subjects are structured. As indicated in a much earlier discussion (in chapter 11), Lacan’s distinction between lalangue and la langue is quite relevant in the context of the current analysis. Pommier says something odd that sounds less strange once one appreciates select details of Lacan’s rich, multifaceted treatments of language: “neuroscientists forget … speech, … the support of which, far from being spiritual, is also material.”44 The oddness has to do with the fact that ample neuroscientific attention has been paid to language, at least in the Lacanian sense of la langue, which refers to the natural languages usually acquired by children and employed by linguistically competent members of given groups of language users. Pommier’s insistence on the material dimension of “speech” (la parole) is crucial here: when it comes to both the spoken and the written, Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalytic metapsychology is at least as concerned with materiality as with meaning. The primary process mentation of lalangue, as a jouis-sens playing with phonemes and graphemes, flows through sounds and images in ways unconstrained by secondary process mentation’s concerns to obey the constraining rules of a language’s (as une langue) syntax and semantics so as to succeed at producing intersubjectively recognizable conventional significance. An analyst, in listening to an analysand’s speech, should be as attentive to the murmurings of meaningless lalangue as to the meaningful utterances of la langue spoken by the (self-)conscious speaker on the couch. When Lacan draws attention to the material signifier (as being different from the sign), this is part of what’s at stake at those moments.45 This is one of the two fundamental aspects of language that Pommier sees the neurosciences overlooking (the other being the links between language and Otherness as understood in Lacanian theory, a topic to be taken up soon below).
As regards lalangue as distinct from la langue, Changeux, who Pommier cites in beginning to weave a neuro-psychoanalytic perspective on language,46 indeed does touch upon infantile babbling in a neurological account of language acquisition.47 One of Changeux’s key theses is his asserti
on that “to learn is to eliminate.”48 He hypothesizes that the developing brain learns numerous things of various sorts through playing “cognitive games.” These games involve the brain spontaneously generating “pre-representations,” an activity that could be described as a process of actively fantasizing, imagining, or hallucinating at the surrounding world, creatively concocting “hypotheses” projected onto enveloping environs.49 In terms of language learning specifically—it ought to be noted in passing that Changeux sympathetically refers to the Saussurian structural linguistics dear to Lacan and Lacanians in his reflections on language50—this means that infantile babbling is a type of game-playing in which a gurgling multitude of sounds automatically are experimented with by the young subject-to-be. Through interactions with the environment, especially the social milieus of language-using adult others, the infant is prompted to pare down the proliferating plethora of noises of its baby tongue (i.e., lalangue) so as to give voice to the narrower set of well-ordered phonemes recognized by the mother tongue (i.e., la langue) into which he/she is being inducted. (This is analogous to Kant’s account, in his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, of how the externally dictated discipline of education and socialization transforms the excessive, unruly freedom of the human child as pre- or protorational into the tamed and domesticated autonomy of the adult rational subject.)51 In other words, early childhood language acquisition isn’t so much a matter of building up une langue; it’s more a matter of tearing down and eliminating (or, more accurately, attempting to eliminate) the nonsensical meanderings and ramblings of lalangue, of the cognitive games jouis-sens plays with the vocal apparatus. La langue is part of what remains of lalangue after the contextually imposed trimming and snipping of “symbolic castration” by the transsubjective Other and intersubjective others of the linguistic universes into which the child is inserted has been undergone. However, psychoanalysis especially divulges veritable mountains of evidence that, sheltering within the parlêtre of la langue, vestiges of lalangue continue to manifest themselves, particularly in the forms familiar from the Freudian “psychopathology of everyday life,” namely, dreams, jokes, parapraxes, slips of the tongue, and so on; the neuroscientific study of language would do well to consider more thoroughly such evidence and phenomena.
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